Posted
by
samzenpuson Wednesday August 15, 2007 @09:53PM
from the streaking-across-the-universe dept.

Andrew Stellman writes "NASA astronomers held a press conference announcing that a new ultraviolet mosaic from NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer shows a speeding star named Mira that's leaving an enormous trail of "seeds" for new solar systems. Mira is traveling faster than a speeding bullet, and has a tail that's 13 light-years long and over 30,000 years old. The website has images and a replay of the teleconference."

I've seen all ~70 episodes of The Original Series and all the movies, and I've no idea where the Kirk-sleeping-with-every-girl-he-could-find thing started. I mean, he showed some interest here and there but that's it.

Roddenberry's intro to the novelization of Star Trek: The Motion Picture responds to the whole Kirk/Spock sexual tension thing in Kirk's voice with a disclaimer to the effect of (I'm paraphrasing from memory, and I read the book when it came out): "there's nothing wrong with two men being attracted to each other, but if I were to go in that direction, I think I'd choose a sexual partner who was interested more often than every 7 years."
I can think of three women Kirk certainly slept with of the top of my head: the slave girl in Bread and Circuses, Miramanee, Carol Marcus; and there are a lot of probables.

This is in my 1979 Pocket Books edition on page 22:
*Editor's note: The human concept of friend is most nearly duplicated in Vulcan thought by the term t'hy'la, which can also mean brother and lover. Spock's recollection (from which this chapter has drawn) is that it was a most difficult moment for him since he did indeed consider Kirk to have become his brother. However, because t'hy'la can be used to mean lover, and since Kirk's and Spock's friendship was unusually close, this has l

I had watched Star Trek most of my life and I didn't figure it out until I started watching DVDs without commercials.It's subtle, but there. In one case, he's trying to seduce a woman to regain control of the ship. They start to kiss. And there's a commercial break. When it resumes from the break, she is fixing her hair and he is sitting on the bed putting his boots back on.

Clearly, something happened during the commercial. Sadly, it wasn't until I was 23 that I actually got to experience the ins and o

I've no idea where the Kirk-sleeping-with-every-girl-he-could-find thing started.

You must be new, that's how things were filmed then. The first ever inter-racial (ie black-white) kiss was on classic Star Trek.

Roddenberry deliberately pushed the envelope whereever he could. Sulu, Chekov on the bridge, etc. The only way a woman could get on was to be married or be mistress to him - Nurse Chapel was his wife, Uhura was his mistress and so was the (can't remember her name and my own videos of the classic series are not handy) blonde babe ensign who was in Charley, etc.

They describe it as traveling at "supersonic" speeds when they should know there is no sound in the vacuum of space.

Actually, there is interstellar dust that can propagate waves. Any medium that can propagate waves has a "speed of sound", but the sounds that travel through that dust are beyond a human's hearing range.

The evidence they provide for it traveling at "supersonic" speeds is the evidence of the shock wave accumulating in front of its direction of travel. It is the same shockwave that is created by a supersonic object in the atmosphere. That kind of shock wave - the sonic boom - develops because the object is traveling faster than the sound waves leaving it - the waves all get piled up in a cone extending behind the object. In the case of Mira, the same thing is happening, except that it's waves of stellar m

Actually, the Kessel Run is through hyperspace. One might imagine that different hyperspace engines would convert the actual distance into relatively smaller transit distances depending on their capability. Therefore, the Millennium Falcon, being a particularly 'fast' ship, had a hyperdrive that made the Kessel Run particularly short (i.e. it took a shorter path through hyperspace than other ships.) If you can assume that all ships travel through hyperspace at the same rate of speed in that dimension, th

Even without that, barring any literary Star Wars sources as non-cannon, it could still be explained.

The "Kessel Run" could be a timed race. Similar to a 0-60 measure. Everybody who does a Kessel Run drives for say, 10 minutes. The further you've gone in that time, the faster the ship you have:). Little bit of a stretch, but not much.

It was explained in one of the books that the planet Kessel (illegal spice production, etc.) was near a group of black holes called the Maw that limited the run to/from the planet to a very few extremely hazardous lanes. The Millenium Falcon was able to make the run in that distance (start of run to end of run) in a short distance because it was fast enough to cut the wash from the black holes.Mind you, Star Wars is so full of revisionism that all the stuff you "know" has been changed a million times. Like

The Kessel run goes past a large black hole. Less powerful ships have to take a detour further around it for fear of being pulled in. The Millenium Falcon is so fast that it can fly much closer to the black hole without being dragged in Futurama-style.
So, faster ships can make the run in less distance.

Solo in A New Hope brags that the Falcon made the Kessel Run in "less than twelve parsecs", referring to his ability to move the ship closer to the Maw's black holes and therefore cut the distance traveled.[6] On the A New Hope DVD audio commentary, Lucas comments that, in the Star Wars universe, traveling through hyperspace requires careful navigation to avoid stars, planets, asteroids, and oth

What a terrible headline and linked article. Mira is a famous red supergiant, the "name-star" of the Mira-class variables. Mira is one of the largest known stars and has been known to astronomers for at least 400 years.

Minor correction: it is a red giant, not a red supergiant. Supergiants are very massive stars (on the order of 10 times the mass of the sun or more) which will eventually explode as supernovae. Ordinary red giants are evolved stars of more modest mass. Mira has a current mass of 1.2 solar masses (according to your Wikipedia link) and would have had an original (main sequence) mass of not much more.It probably has the largest apparent size (angular diameter) of any star except the sun, but it isn't "one of t

Newsflash: Our own Sun's velocity is 217 km/s (relative to the galactic center) and 20 km/s relative to the average speed of neighboring stars.

For comparison, a "speeding bullet" slugs anywhere from around 1km/s (sniper rifle) to ~100m/s (short-barrel pistol).

In addition, Wikipedia states that Mira's velocity is 63.8km/s -- which is actually slower than our own's sun (which has no "tail"), leading to two conclusions: (1) Mira's tail is caused by some other factor than it's velocity alone, and (2) Mira's speed is also so faster than a "speeding bullet" beyond comparison. In other words, the comparison is not just off-scale but also irrelevant.

If you insist on using laymen's "cool-sounding" metaphors to describe scientific phenomena, at least check your facts and context, or you will just make a moron out of yourself.

Even worse than the speeding bullet part is the section on this page(last paragraph) [nasa.gov] where it says that 'Coincidentally, Mira and its "whale of a tail" can be found in the tail of the whale constellation.' I think NASA just likes making dumb jokes and references in their media announcements.

91.44 meters: length of an American football field, excluding end zones.1 light year = 9.4605284 × 10^15 meters.

so 103461596675415.57305336832895888, or one hundred three trillion, four hundred sixty-one billion, five hundred ninety-six million, six hundred seventy-five thousand, four hundred fifteen-ish football fields per light year.

Wikipedia may state that, the NASA press release claims it's travelling at 130 km/s, doesn't say what that's relative to but I would suspect the neighbourhood average (since there's a bow shock it has to be relative to that I would assume). Of course is could be relative to the ether and NASA keeping a rather large change in physics to themselves...

Yes, because when they say supersonic they couldn't possibly mean oh I don't know faster than the speed of sound...

You know the speed that pressure changes can propogate through a fluid (such as the not-quite-vacuum intertelar medium around the star). That speed in which there's a change in the physics due to the formation of a shock wave (because the object is traveling faster than the pressure shift that "tells" the "upstream" fluid that the object is there).

100km/s or there abouts - depends on the local density of the interstellar medium.

I'm curious what you think the sarcasm in your answer contributes. I only mention it because it reminds me of a guy who I knew who didn't realize that his tone of smug superiority only annoyed the people around him without winning friends or influencing people. And it certainly didn't contribute to him getting laid!

I think there is a misunderstanding on the submitter's side. Here's what NASA says [nasa.gov]:

The ultraviolet image shows a gigantic shock wave, called a bow shock, in front of the star, and an enormous, 13-light-year-long trail of turbulence in its wake.

Further they note that this effect is much like the supesonic shock wave and the turbulent tail created by a bullet. The appropriate image is also available at the NASA site. I couldn't find a statement that it's fast as a bullet [which, as the parent rightfully shows, would be ridiculous].

Mira's velocity is 63.8km/s -- which is actually slower than our own's sun (which has no "tail")

Given that with Hubble we can only see "3 or 4 pixels" worth of Pluto (according to the last episode of Universe on the History channel), how do we know what debris we may or may not be leaving behind our solar system as we move through space?

Just a thought, even if you take gravity out of the equation, bullets are subject to drag.So as an analogy, in the relative vacuum of space, the former is true, and gravity can provide some measure of drag, even on a passing star. Assuming that those rules apply, could this star be decellarated, perhaps by gravitational pulls from neighboring stars, and/or dark matter? Another possibility is that the star also has a slower than normal rotation, so as it pokes along at a slower speed, it occasionally outgass

Well, either, Wikipedia is wrong, or the guys at Galex, who actually did the work, are wrong, as they say [caltech.edu] Mira is traveling at approximately "130 kilometers per second" relative to the gas it's traveling through. And that, combined with Mira shedding it's outer layers as it expands and contracts, is why it has a tail.

The sad thing is that it's not Slashdot's words, they are quoted from the NASA article itself.The even sadder thing is that I don't think it's the NASA guys that are this dumb, but rather the target audience that NASA expects. To the general population, bullet-fast, sound-fast, planet orbit-fast and light-fast, all amount to one thing, "really fast". Give them a number and they won't know what to do with it, but throw a completely off-the-wall metaphor, and they'll think "wow this is cool".

May I ask for a reference to your statement that the speed of -sound- in interstellar medium is ~100km/s?For all I know, the speed of sound in a medium increases with a medium's density. Pure vacuum transmits no sound at all. The speed of sound in water is much faster than that in the air.

Note that I'm referring to -sound- specifically, rather than any other form of transmitted waves (subatomic radiation, whether beta or gamma, for example stellar pulses, and the like, are not "sound" in their own right, ev

That's easy: God created the star together with the tail, 'cause that's his divine plan. Or to test your faith. Or maybe he liked pretty tails.Don't get me wrong, I'm an atheist myself, but I just can't see anyone's true faith stumbling upon that one. If people can believe that God put dinosaur bones there to test you, why would their mental defenses be shattered by something like this?

And if you think scientific units and measurements put those kinds of beliefs to rest... let's just say that there are thos

Just to point out - in case you weren't aware - Stellarium is rather less detailed than the images that have revealed this phenomenon. It is designed to see what a small telescope sees, whereas this was found using a state-of-the-art space telescope.

Mira is traveling faster than a speeding bullet, relative to what object?

Actually the speed (relative to anything) is irrelevant. A moving object will leave a tail in two scenarios:

1) It's moving quickly relative to its medium (ie a wake left by a ship through water). Now there's no such thing as the ether but presumably there could be some magnetic or gravitational factor (a nearby black hole) that's stripping away material, maybe even some weird property of the solar system is causing it to spew out material in that direction.

Pseudo-comet star, that is what you areFlying at supersonic speedsThough sound cannot propagate through a vacuumTail lightyears long through outer spaceWe know TFA will get the science wrong uh huhAnd the dupe will posted in a week uh huh

I usually choke when journalists do a bad job presenting science. Sometimes the tables get turned, and they quote exactly what's said. Unfortunately. So, in the spirit of equal chain jerking:

From TFA as presented on MSNBC: "If Neanderthal man had ultraviolet eyes and could look above the atmosphere, he could have seen the beginning of this tail forming," study leader Chris Martin, an astronomer at the California Institute of Technology, said during a teleconference Wednesday.

AWEsome, d00d.

And, if they had ultraviolet eyes on 30,000 light year long eye stalks, they could not only seeabove the atmosphere, they could see the tail as it formed, RIGHT WHERE IT WAS HAPPENING.

OH. OH. And if the DINOSAURS had ultraviolet eyes, and could see above the atmosphere, they could see it 65 million years BEFORE it happened. And they could probably also see that asteroid coming and build SPACESHIPS, no wait, SPACE DINOSAUR MOTORCYCLES, they could get off the planet before it got hit, and fly to that star and live there, and then 65 million years later all wag their tails at the same time and make the star shoot off gas and dust like a BIG TAIL that we could see, because they wanted to say hi and let us know they were all OK and we shouldn't be all sad because we thought they all got extincted.

I guess we can't all be Carl Sagan. Because then there would be BIL..... nevermind.

Did anyone notice this in tiny print? Usually NASA mentions satellite transponders but now (at least first time I noticed) they are mentioning Pathfire.

Pathfire was bought out by DG Fast Channel in June. It seems they sell servers maybe and services too. It looks like what people call video press releases.

Anyway is this a commercial service only open to news agencies? Anybody know?It doesn't make any sense, NASA should just dump it all onto a torrent so it can be watched with one of the new torrent film players that advertise open video, like Zudeo or Miro. I spent so much time once upon a time with CU-SeeMe to see NASA live video, and more recently saw interesting science discussions, but they really have very high quality television broadcast quality film they sell. Maybe HD too.

Wouldn't it make more sense, in terms of saving money and making it more accessible, to just host a torrent? Certainly this DG feed is a hose into TV stations where they can patch in some shots if they want some filler, but to degrade NASA into that kind of video press release is just so bizarre! If anyone knows how to get this high quality video I'd like to see it. NASA needs to get with the times.

Note to TV reporters: Broadcast quality video file (animation, images and sound bites) to accompany this story are available through the Pathfire distribution service.

While looking at the image of this "Wondering Star", I started to think, "Why such a predictable pattern?" It makes sense that the matter is being left behind because the star is hitting something, (dark matter?), and the resulting reaction is the leaving behind of atoms that will eventually be pulled by relatively nearby stars. What is most interesting, is that this trail is not in the visible, but in the UV bandwidth. In the UV band width, are we looking at the speed of atoms being "drained" off? Could it be that the Star is traveling "Up Stream?", or is it in the way of a "Dark Matter" current?

Now divide that by 30,000 years and we get 2,547,566,666.667 miles. now there are 8,760 hours in a year, so if we divide 2,547,566,666.667 by 8,760, we get 290,818.113 miles per hour. Now, that IS fast, especially given the average asteroid skips along at 40,000 mph. But it's not THAT fast - it would take that star an hour to go from here to the moon. If it did it in 5 minutes - yeah, that's fast. But an hour? Heck - our feeble crappy spacecraft get there in a few days...

Enraged and full of anger? Who could tell?
Rides the Metal Monster? Not so much.
Breathing Smoke and Fire? Check.
Louder than an Atom Bomb? Based on Proximity. But we'll let this go with a check.
Chromium Plated boiling metal? Not so much.
Brighter than a 1,000 suns? Not quite.

An object 400 times the radius of the sun, known as a star for at least 400 years, in a binary relationship with a smaller star can not be a "large, slow-moving comet". Please refer to these links before posting any further on this subject: Mira [wikipedia.org] Comet [wikipedia.org]

Keep an open mind and don't accept every theory you hear out of the scientific community as fact.

Granted. However, this being a comet is out of the realm of possibility, which you would have known had you done even the most cursory research into either Mira or, for that matter, comets.

Had you posted that Mira was a Dyson Sphere, you would have been equally ridiculed as it flies in the face of both the observed facts and the notion of what a Dyson Sphere is, in precisely the way your original comment flies i